The magic of the digital medium is rendering us more powerful, but also more dependent on a secure and stable cyberspace.

Human beings have fought over land for millennia, beginning with the first agrarian communities. More recently, in the era of mass conscription and rapid industrialization, nation-states also have fought for people's collective thinking or for access to oil. In the 21st century, groups and institutions will increasingly struggle for control of cyberspace, the digital domain where most human activity is already managed - from music distribution to industrial manufacturing, the electricity grid and individual banking accounts. All this is at risk today.

Just over three years ago, Russia fired the first shot in its war upon Georgia, the first ever combined kinetic and cyber war. The shot was not fired from the 125 millimeter gun of a T-72 tank, but from the keyboard of a computer. The impact was a lurid defacement of www.president.gov.ge, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s website. Various kinds of cyber attacks continued throughout and beyond the kinetic assault. Careful analysis by several independent experts revealed the key role played by Russian organized crime—the Kremlin’s cyber war reserve force. These cyber thugs are formidable opponents, but they can be taken down.

UK counter terrorism forces are gearing up for an expected increase in Al Qaeda-led ‘cyber jihad' and lone terrorist attacks in the future, as the tools and information needed to carry out such attacks become increasingly widespread online, according to a new report.

The Home Office Counter Terrorism Strategy said that, although there has been "no evidence of systematic cyber terrorism" as yet, there has been related terrorist activity since the first recorded incident in 2010.

Cyber-attackers hit another Department of Energy research laboratory last week, forcing IT managers to shut down all of the facility’s computer links to the outside world to try to contain the damage.

Essential computer services remain offline nearly a week after a cyber-attackers hit another Department of Energy laboratory, this time in the state of Washington.

The Energy Department’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington shut down Internet access and email services following a sophisticated cyber-attack, according to a July 5 post on the facility’s Twitter account. Officials became aware of the cyber-attack on July 1, Greg Koller, the lab’s spokesperson, told the Associated Press.

From the satellite pictures on Google Earth, Jinan looks like any other Chinese city — sprawling construction sites, massive factory blocks, apartment buildings, a university, dozens of railway lines and wide-open plazas.

But according to the Internet giant, somewhere in the city — the capital of China’s eastern Shandong province — are the computer servers used to try to steal the passwords of hundreds of Google e-mail account holders. They included senior U.S. officials, human rights activists and journalists.

Perhaps, experts say, it came from the “technical reconnaissance bureaus” of the People’s Liberation Army said to be based in the city. Perhaps it came from the technical college U.S. investigators linked last year to a previous attack on Google that prompted it to temporarily quit mainland China.

A major data breach is like quicksand ...the more you struggle with it and panic the worse it gets.

Put yourself in the shoes of a few of the major organizations that have had high-profile data breaches due to compromised applications or web sites lately ...the more they struggle and fight, the worse things appear to get. Why is this?

Remember that the enemy you're fighting on the digital battle field isn't like the one out on a real battlefield, there are no castle walls.

You wake up late one morning because your alarm didn't go off. Puzzled by the lack of electricity, you reach for your phone to call the power company. You don't even get a dial tone. Your cellphone can't connect either, despite four full bars and a charged battery. You try to go online with your laptop. No dice. It dawns on you that something is really wrong

This scenario sounds like the beginning of a Hollywood disaster movie. It isn't that far off. This is just one way a cyberattack against our country could play out. A cyberattack is a politically motivated attack on computers that control critical infrastructures. It can also affect government and financial websites.

In a case of grand-scale cyber sabotage, federal agents arrested a man who they said retaliated against a New Jersey pharmaceutical company he once worked for by wiping out chunks of digital files, causing $300,000 in losses, some of it from a laptop connected to a McDonalds wi-fi network. The key piece of evidence: a big breakfast.

Jason Cornish, 37, effectively froze Shionogi Inc.’s operations for several days while employees there – unable to ship product, cut checks, or communicate by email – tried to repair the damage, the government says.

A group of hackers defaced several Fraternal Order of Police websites across Arizona on Thursday evening, posting the user names, passwords and other information of hundreds of officers.

A release by the hackers, plastered across the homepages of the affected websites, claimed they were releasing information on 1,200 officers. This marks the third major release of documents and personal information on Arizona law enforcement officials within the past week.

Unidentified computer hackers have attacked al-Qaida’s Internet presence, shutting down its ability to communicate to the rest of the world through video and text. A number of their distribution channels have been shut down at the same time, in a sophisticated and well organised attack.

“Al-Qaida’s online communications have been temporarily crippled, and it does not have a single trusted distribution channel available on the Internet,” said Evan Kohlmann of Flashpoint Global Partners, a group which monitors al-Qaida’s online communications. Kohlmann went on to speak of an attack that was “well coordinated and involved the use of an unusual cocktail of relatively sophisticated techniques.”